Prepare for the possibility that after leaving it you will begin seeing ordinary people - women, particularly - as characters in the polymorphic Sherman mold.

Entwining self-portraiture, disguise, caricature, fantasy and social observation, Sherman has made staged photographs for decades that may command more admiration than affinity but gradually infiltrate one's vision of people beyond the frame.

The phrase "makeover culture," denoting today's mania for the refashioning of self and situation, has lately made its way into common speech. But Sherman saw it coming - and maybe gave it a push - long ago.

Her late-'70s black and white "Untitled Film Stills" have most of a room to themselves at SFMOMA. In retrospect, they seem to have sprung from several sources: from a pervasive American longing - which Sherman tasted - to "be in pictures" and from Andy Warhol's fetishizing of film stars.

They also record an impulse that many of Sherman's contemporaries shared to intervene in a newly vivid media-formed sense of reality.

Leading the way

Sherman's beginnings in black and white also highlight the chromatic daring of much that has followed.

In making the "Untitled Film Stills," Sherman shot herself in various interior and outdoor settings, posing as actresses in imaginary dramatic movies.

They evoked the conquest of imagination by "the phantom empire," as Geoffrey O'Brien calls the movie industry. That intrusion of image management into self-fashioning, continued by television and interactive media, define the firmament in which Sherman's star has risen.

Since the early 1980s, she has worked exclusively in her studio, integrating outdoor backdrops, and the occasional indoor one, initially with slide projections and more recently by digital means.

Digital technology has also enabled her to appear more than once in a single picture: as both sisters in "Untitled #475" (2008), for instance, and as all four party girls in "Untitled #463" (2007-08).

Feminist critics saw authorial triumph in Sherman's work of the '80s. Despite her frequently portraying women in seemingly abject or ominous situations, she inhabited them all with a sort of omniscience that seemed to comprehend critically society's influence on women's inner and outward lives.

Sherman has intermittently abandoned contemporary character invention for bizarre exercises such as "Untitled #193" (1989), which foreshadows a series of "art history pictures."

They fill a room here, the way they did in the New York exhibition, which overall was larger by 15 works.

Unfortunately, the art history pieces show Sherman at her most overtly comic, with her stagecraft scantly disguised. In them, she dons conventions of portrait painting, from early Renaissance to rococo, as if they were costumes.

With a few exceptions, such as the pathetic and Rembrandtine "Untitled #222" (1990), these works go clunk.

Because the installation disregards chronology, the so-called sex pictures and still lifes - some of Sherman's most confrontational - follow the art history charades.

Deliberate messes

The deliberately revolting messes in works such as "Untitled #182" (1987) and "Untitled #175" (1987) evoke bulimia as one sort of self-abuse to which social pressure can drive women. But these pictures also mark a rejoinder of sorts to the excesses of then-vaunted, male-dominated neo-Expressionist painting.

Linking Sherman's work to external events is risky, though, and finally unnecessary.

The recent so-called society pictures that culminate the survey, evoking the seven stages of snootiness, might have responded as aptly to crazes of the '80s as to the 1 percent's continued ascendancy since the crash of '08.

Sherman's recent clowns, as a theme, tempt us and infer some sort of disguised political ridicule. But their precursor, the strangely wan, Japonesque "Untitled #296" (1994), awakens us to the series' improbable emotional range, the clowns' over-the-top disguises slackening any possible threads of topical reference.